


on the trial of Ryan Seabend; Muggleborn Slytherin

by chaWOOPa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Muggle-born, Not quite prose, Slytherin, Sort of Poetry, The Golden Trio Era (Harry Potter), excessive use of metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 03:00:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16109396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaWOOPa/pseuds/chaWOOPa
Summary: I am elevenand I sit beneath a hat that has executed several more before me and I do not yet know that I have walked myself with pride towards my own gallows. I ask myself why this world separates us if they want us to act as a whole. I am not aware that the hat has already drawn and quartered all that I am and seen that I am brilliant and I am brave but I am not bold. I do not know that it has inspected my head and found the way I lived before and deemed it an offence worth the next seven years of my life. The hat tells me it doesn't matter that we are separate houses when we are all one school, and then it lets the blade fall to spill my red blood over the green and silver drapery that will become my shroud.The hat doesn't know it is the executioner any more than I know I am the executed.





	on the trial of Ryan Seabend; Muggleborn Slytherin

I am eleven.    
My world has just been made larger by the appearance of a woman in robes who tells me my place is at her school and I believe her. My place has never been at home. Where hands smack just as hard and as often as words and I survive because I must And because who else is going to prove That I can thrive where they all say I should have died?    
Not the world I was in.   
  
I am eleven    
and I sit beneath a hat that has executed several more before me and I do not yet know that I have walked myself with pride towards my own gallows. I ask myself why this world separates us if they want us to act as a whole. I am not aware that the hat has already drawn and quartered all that I am and seen that I am brilliant and I am brave but I am not bold. I do not know that it has inspected my head and found the way I lived before and deemed it an offence worth the next seven years of my life. The hat tells me it doesn't matter that we are separate houses when we are all one school, and then it lets the blade fall to spill my red blood over the green and silver drapery that will become my shroud.    
The hat doesn't know it is the executioner any more than I know I am the executed.   
  
I am eleven    
and a child two years older than me slides down the table to where I have started my own feast. They hand me a piece of paper under the table that doesn't crinkle like it should and I pretend I dont notice because already I can hear the others talking about family matters and politics like they were raised for this. We eat, us two, in silence, and then when it is time to go we stand together and we leave together. They pull me away from the others my age and we find ourselves alone, and I am told just who I am in this house of mine. I do not weep. I have allies here, after all.    
I spend more time learning to survive than learning magic that year.    
  
I am eleven.   
I survived the year and no one knew I was even struggling because my allies are nothing if not protective. I am nothing if not determined. The battlefield is colored green and silver because my fellows are a step ahead, the battlefield is green and silver because it is the table at which I sit, the battlefield is green and silver because it is my own body, the battlefield is green and I am living through it, the battlefield is silver and I am drowning in it. No one is here to save me but myself. The hall goes red and gold and I act like I am trained to, but in that moment there is nothing harder to be than angry.    
Anger is so hard to hold inside when all that is outside is hate.    
  
I am twelve   
I come back to school and my arm is broken but healing and I can only breathe through my left lung but I would rather this layer of hell than that one so I come back. It is awkward when I cannot speak for long enough on the train until someone five years older taps my shoulder and their tie is green like mine but their smile is silver so I know that when they bring me to a place to sit they are taking me somewhere safe. By the time I enter school my arm is more healed than broken and my lungs are working together again, and we who sat in solidarity shrouded in silver disperse back to where we belong so that we shouldn't stand out.    
I know now that I never stood alone.    
  
I am twelve.   
A kid my age with my same blood running through their veins has been attacked because of this blood we share and there are children my age who celebrate it.    
I live with them.    
  
I am twelve.   
A kid my age with my same blood running through their veins has been attacked because of this blood we share and there are children and adults of all ages who closed ranks to protect others like them.    
I am counted among the attackers.   
  
I am twelve.    
This isn't the first time the world has risen against me to tell me I am evil.    
This is the first I have wanted it to be true.   
  
I am twelve.    
I watch a boy in red and gold go from good to evil to good at a moments notice and I wonder if he might understand. He saves a lion from a snake and comes out of it with silver in his hands and manipulation in his mouth and I think I might just be in love. He finally looks at me and I swallow my heart whole because he wears his on his sleeve and it is screaming about snakes and lions, nevermind that he is a dragon, and dragons are closer to me than they are what he is trying to be. After all, what are dragons but snakes with wings and legs.

After watching a dragon spend its days in a lion's den I decide one can also live with snakes.

 

I am thirteen. 

I am homeless but no one knows this because the only two people who could have told are dead. I have nightmares about the way my magic snapped, about the splatter of red that coated the living room as my father screamed and the glassy eyes of a mother that loved me only enough to take a killing blow for me but nothing less. My brain knows that blood should not be green, but in the nightmares I drip silver onto the carpet and he sprays green onto the walls while my mother drowns in red and gold and the hat tells me that we are all one school even if we are all in different houses. I send an owl out for the first time three nights after it happens, once the shock has worn off. A silver serpent with a slip of paper that doesn't crinkle fetches me twenty minutes later, and a witch with eyes the color of spring helps me clean away what is left of the days before. 

We can only clean away so much. 

 

I am fourteen.

I have blood on my hands and only three people in the world know and I think I am at peace with the fact that there was no other option that night. I find out that while I grieved the world let a murder free and it wasn't me but the school still looks at my robes as though it was and if I hadn't found that when my magic snapped it changed more than just my life I would think they could see the blood on me. No. They see the battlefield but not the blood. They see the battlefield but not the battle. They see the battlefield, they do not see the aftermath. Like the unicorns they exalt, my blood is silver as the stars. 

i wonder if they have killed the same as i. 

 

I am fourteen. 

the dragon boy roars that he is innocent and I realize why he is able to fit into a den of lions so proud they slay the young that would rise above them. He does not know he is a dragon. I put my head down and watch him fly like a dragon does, hoard like a dragon would, and then rise like only a dragon could out of death and pain and loss and I wonder what it will take for him to look down and notice his scales. 

He announces that a snake is here to kill us all and I wonder if he knows that all includes us.

 

I am fifteen. 

There are extra people in the silver compartment that replace a few who did not come back, and they tell us that this time we aren't gambling with bullies, we are gambling with murderers. School is a tightrope of knowing the truth and acting we don't; play to the ones who hate us for our house that we are exactly what they hate; play to the ones who hold our lives in their hands so they don't realize they hold the power to see us erased from the world; play to the adults that it is all just every day stress. Don't get caught tipping or you might just lose the chance to even fall. I learn that the easy way when a silver seventh tips just a little too much. 

I swallow my heart when we learn they swallowed green lights for Christmas dinner, but there isn't really that much heart left to go down.

 

I am fifteen. 

I close ranks around the smallest silver serpents because I have blood on my hands already so what is a little bit more. I pass notes on paper that doesn't make a sound and I learn the spells that separate the common room into them and us. I charm locks and heal hexes and teach twelve year olds how to walk like they are twenty because if I don't then who will. I hear about the dragon's den two days before it gets destroyed and I hold my treasures close because we will not fall.

We will not even begin to tip. 

 

I am sixteen. 

There is war in the hallways but it is fought with words because here is a sacred hall where us and them is supposed to be all. There is no all. This year when the butcher is drawn to partition his prey I watch the world instead of the ones he is sentencing because there is no wonder in them this year. I watch the lions lick their lips as they survey the crop of young, I watch the ravens play aloof and the badgers bring their own close, then I watch the way everyone sours the moment the first s sounds and I think I know the problem. 

The child on the chopping block is a serpent, but all they can see is a snake.

 

I am sixteen.

I am a warrior on a battlefield built for two and I have carved out a section of shelter for this third little few. They say the enemy of my enemy but what if both enemies don't think you exist? What if one is so caught up in the green they don't see the silver of your symbol or the red of your blood? What if the other would throw you out for daring to think you could even claim to enter? The enemy of my enemy is also my enemy because they may call me the exception but they call me  _ exception  _ and not  _ individual _ , and there are too many of us for it to be an exception anymore. 

_ Exception  _ implies I was ever one of them to begin with. 

 

I am seventeen.

I cast my first cruciatus at a lion that dared to bare its teeth at my youngest charge and when the man who asked us to do it compliments me I tell him it wasn't that hard. The lion bares a smile at me this time as the man laughs and any light left in my eyes has to be gone when I look around and see them all rising to strike at me. I play with my wand and pretend I don't see red when I whisper loud enough to silence a storm that it is easy to defend a child who has never seen war like this from a warrior who has lived it for years now. 

The lions don't back down, but neither do they attack. 

 

I am seventeen

The first time I take control of a lion I cannot bring myself to meet the stares of any of the people in the room with any kind of emotion because this one? This one got one of my serpents killed. He throws off the spell ten minutes later, but not until I force him to tell everyone what he did to my charge. He tells the room about a hallway where he cornered a child a quarter his size and called them evil, he tells them how he left them in the corner, cowering, covered in the color of the correct house, for someone else to find. He tells them that none of them probably even know their name, least of all him. Later, the man who calls himself teacher asks why I did it with a hand on my shoulder and breath that smells like death in my face. I tell him I knew the child's name. He smiles and my stomach twists. 

He tells me I have the highest grade in defense and I have to remind myself that the only thing I am defending is my own.

 

I am seventeen. 

The school rises to protect a dragon who is too weak to protect himself and I can't stop the sneer that pulls the corner of my mouth into a snarl as I look him in the eyes. I want to ask how well it worked, pretending to be a lion so hard he forgot he wasn't one in the first place; ask what kind of dragon forgets that it can breath fire on those who dare hurt the ones he loves; ask what kind of lion, even, could forget that it can roar. Instead I send a silent message to each of my serpents that if we are not wanted here, we will survive somewhere else. 

I hear later that the dragon died and lived and I take a deep breath as I count serpents like sheep and sleep easy knowing I lost only the one I could not reach in time. 

 

I am seventeen. 

School is over, the war is over, and my serpents are sleeping safe at homes we kept that way through no help nor hands but our own. I sit on a chair in a room of raised seating accused of crime after crime and the blood on my hands sings for the recognition it is receiving until they finally make their last charge known.

“ _ Death Eater _ " they sling at me, and my lip twitches. 

“ _ Supporter of those who would have seen us all dead _ ” they launch at me, and my breath huffs out my nose. 

“ _ A bigot of the highest degree _ " they slash at me and finally my form caves as I laugh. 

I think of the children who are safe at home with parents who have survived this genocide and I look up at the stunned faces above me and proclaim that my worst crime, the worst thing they can think to throw at me, is having been a dragon hidden in a den of snakes whose scales blended in too well. 

 

“ _ Look closely at the one who saved us, i'm not the only dragon hiding in dens we should not, i’m just the only one you decided was a snake before you took a look at the rest of me. _ ”

**Author's Note:**

> so i was only semi-lucid from migraine and i got a little carried away with a thing about slytherins who are muggle- or half-blood and raised in the muggle world, or raised in both, and who have to kind of learn to stick together and defend each other as a sort of third faction in the whole "everyone vs slytherin" thing that rowling built up. 
> 
> there are a few lines in this im super proud of but like, let me know if yall had any specific yall liked? cause. im a slut for validation? also i just would like to know.


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